All Chapters of After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

They let me see Rowan on the Monday, in a room off the Temple's lower hall that is not a cell and is not anything else either.Stone. A table. A high window. A brother at the door who had been told to stand where he could see us and not where he could hear us, which I understood to be somebody's small kindness and have never found out whose.He stood up when I came in, which undid me rather more than I was prepared for."Sit down, Rowan.""No.""Sit down before you fall down. You have not slept in four days and you look like a man who has been arguing with the ceiling.""I have been arguing with the ceiling." He sat. "It has the better case."I put the parcel on the table. Freda's bread, and a wedge of the hard cheese he likes, and a clean shirt that Mara had gone and bought with her own money and would not discuss.He looked at the shirt for slightly too long.A man will hold himself together through a trial, an arrest and four nights on a stone bench, and then somebody buys him a shi

He did not answer it in the chamber. He was far too good for that. What he did was let the silence run four seconds longer than was comfortable, and then say, "The Crown will answer that question in writing, before the Temple, within the week," which is the most expensive sentence available to a man in his position and everybody in that room knew it. Then he dismissed the chamber, and had me brought to a small room behind the dais with two guards outside it and nobody at all inside, and closed the door himself. Cassian was not permitted to come with me. He took that better than I expected, which is to say he said nothing at all and stood against a pillar in a room emptying of five hundred people and made himself extremely easy to find. "That was well done," Darius said. "It was not done for your admiration." "No. It was done because you wanted it in the clerks' books before I could decide whether to let it be." He crossed to a side table and poured water, and offered me a glass,

They gave Rowan Vale seven years. I had told myself I would not go. I went. I sat in the third row of a Temple hall with Cassian on one side and Freda on the other and my hands in my lap, and I listened to a careful man of sixty spend forty minutes deciding the rest of somebody's life, and it took forty minutes because he did it properly. Not a rope. Seven years of Temple service at the lower registry, which in this city means the cellars and the cataloguing and the parts of the archive nobody has looked at since the flood, and a bar on ever holding a Temple appointment or a House commission again as long as he lives. The officer who read the sentence was the same careful man of sixty who had rung a bell three times in the old arena, and he read out, as part of it, the fourteen prior findings I had spent four mornings pulling out of the registry, and he cited them by year and clause. I had given the citations to Rowan's advocate on the Tuesday and had not been told whether they wou

The garden was grey before it was light, and my mother sat through that transition the way she sat through most things — still, and with the complete attention of a woman who has learned that stillness is often the only prayer that reaches anything. I had not moved either. We had stayed on that bench through the cold coming up out of the grass, through the dew settling on the hem of her dress, through all the small hours that separate one person's answer from another person's readiness to hear it. At some point in the dark, she had taken my hand the way she had taken it in the scentless room, and I had let her because I was learning — very slowly, in the way one learns things that do not come naturally — that accepting my mother's hand was not the same as surrendering to her. It was simply her hand. When the light came, it came all at once, the way it does in late autumn when the sun clears whatever has been holding it back. The garden went from grey to gold in the space of a breath

I did not go back to the Keeper that day. Instead, I sat in the library with my mother and with my grandmother's file, and I began to understand something that no amount of explanation would have taught me — which was that there is a difference between knowing a thing intellectually and understanding it in your body. My mother had filed a protection for a daughter she had not yet conceived. A daughter who would be born into a conspiracy that had been designed to break her. A daughter who would be drugged, tested, and told she was defective before she even understood what it meant to be a woman. My mother had known this was coming. Somehow, impossibly, she had known. The file held one more thing, buried in the last section. A letter, addressed in my mother's own hand to the Keeper, dated seven years after that first filing. _I have made a choice,_ it read. _I have chosen to enter the stasis protocol. Not as a victim of it, but as a participant. I know what will happen to my daughte